Unpopular opinions on personal productivity

Before Christmas, I stumbled upon an interesting Twitter thread. It was started by Andrew Chen, General Partner at a16z, who asked:

What is your least popular but deeply held opinion on personal productivity?

He replied to his own tweet to get things started, commenting:

Being super organized is a bad thing. Means there’s no room for serendipity, deep thought, can make you overly passive on other peoples’ use of your time, as opposed to being focused on outbound. (Sorry to all my super Type A friends)

I’d definitely agree with that. Some of the others in the thread that I agree with are:

9hour workdays are a byproduct of the industrial age. Personal productivity takes a deep fall after grinding on work for 5hours. Office hours kill personal time and productivity (@lpuchii)

Going on a run in the middle of the workday (@envarli)

Use pen and paper for scribbling notes (@uneeb123)

No one else has my job nor are they me, so I can’t simply follow the prescriptions of others. To be more productive, I need to look for new ideas and test. What works for someone else may be antithetical to my work. (@bguenther)

Great ideas rarely come from brainstorming sessions. It comes from pondering over a problem for a significant amount of time and coupling it with lots of experiments (@rajathkedi)

As ever, about half-way down the lengthy thread, it devolves into general productivity advice rather than ‘unpopular opinions’. Still worth a browse!